This week a small piece of rock will be thrown into space on one of the strangest interplanetary trips ever attempted. A small piece of 10p coin-sized Martian basalt will launch aboard an American robot probe on Thursday and propelled toward the red planet on a seven-month journey to its homeworld.
This extraordinary odyssey, the interplanetary equivalent of sending coal to Newcastle, will form a key part of NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 expedition. Space engineers say the rock, which has been donated by the Natural History Museum in London, was It will use to calibrate detectors aboard the Perseverance rover robot after it lands and begins its search for signs of past lives on the planet.
“When you turn on the instruments and start tuning them before using them for research, you calibrate them into materials that will be like the unknown substances you are about to study. So what better to study rocks on Mars than a lump that originated there? said Professor Caroline Smith, chief meteorologist at the Museum of Natural History.
Scientists were confident that the rock they were returning to Mars originated from the planet, added Smith, who is also a member of the Mars 2020 science team. “Little gas bubbles trapped inside that meteorite have exactly the same composition as the atmosphere. from Mars, so we know our rock came from there. “
The Martian meteorite is believed to have been created when an asteroid or comet sank on the planet about 600,000 to 700,000 years ago, throwing debris into space. One of those pieces of debris swept through the solar system and eventually crashed into Earth. That meteorite, now known as SAU 008, was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been in the care of the Natural History Museum ever since.
Among the instruments installed in the Perseverance rover is a high-precision laser called Sherloc, which will be used to decipher the chemical composition of rocks and determine if they may contain organic materials that indicate that life ever existed, or still exists, in Mars. The inclusion of a piece of SAU 008 is intended to ensure that this is done with the utmost precision.
“The rock piece we shipped was specifically chosen because it is the right material in terms of chemistry, but it is also a very hard rock,” added Smith. “Some of the Martian meteorites we have are very fragile. This meteorite is as tough as old boots.
Once Perseverance has selected the most promising rocks it can find, it will cache them on the Martian surface. These will be retrieved by subsequent robot missions and launched into space towards Earth for analysis.
• This article was amended on July 27, 2020 because the headline of an earlier version was incorrect to refer to the meteorite heading to Mars “after 600,000 years on Earth.” That was the approximate duration of his trip to Earth. It was also modified to take into account Caroline Smith’s role as lead meteor curator at the National Museum of History.
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